The Ojai Youth Opera is set to premiere its first original commissioned opera, “Nightingale & The Tower.” The new opera by composer Jason Treuting, Grammy award-winning musician Mikael Jorgensen and OYO Founder and Artistic Director Rebecca Comerford tells the story of a young boy’s odyssey to find himself while discovering the delicate balance between technology and the environment in a dystopian {…}
The Met Opera will close its season and its 2018-19 Live in HD series with a performance of Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites.” The broadcast, which kicks off 11:55 a.m. Eastern time, will be headlined by Isabel Leonard in her second HD broadcast of the year. Leonard is now onto her seventh HD broadcast following appearances in “Roméo et Juliette,” “The {…}
Verdi’s “Rigoletto” will get the live stream treatment at the Vienna State Opera on May 9, 2019. But there will a nice twist for audiences. Joseph Calleja will take on the role of the villainous Duke of Mantua with Andrea Carroll as Gilda. Christopher Maltman will interpret the title role with Jongmin and Nadia Krasteva as Sparafucile and Maddalena, respectively. {…}
San Francisco Opera’s 2019 Summer Season opens with Bizet’s “Carmen” with an all-star cast. The production by Francesca Zambello is set to star American mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges in her first professional performances of the title role and American tenor Matthew Polenzani in his role debut as Don José. They are joined by Romanian soprano Anita Hartig, who makes her San {…}
The New York Opera Fest 2019 kicked off on Monday, April 29 and for the next several weeks, New Yorkers will get ample opportunity to enjoy opera in a variety of unique ways. As has been OperaWire’s tradition over the years, we have reached out to a number of the companies participating in the festival and have asked them a {…}
The Opera Maghiara di Cluj Napoca in Romania has announced a new production of “I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata.” The new production by Csaba Némedi will mark the opera’s Romania premiere and will showcase legendary soprano Elena Mosuc in her role debut as Giselda. The production will also star Sorin Lupu, István Kovács, Orsolya Veress, Arnold Gergely, Zsombor Rétyi, László Mányoki, Adorján {…}
On May 4, 2019, George Gagnidze will celebrate his 100th performance in Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at the Metropolitan Opera. Rigoletto has become George Gagnidze’s signature role, having performed it in his career since the very beginning. “Rigoletto has been a key to success right from the beginning of my career and I owe him so much”, says the Georgian baritone. “In {…}
Pacific Opera Project’s “Madama Butterfly,” presented recently in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, was acclaimed for presenting Puccini’s opera in Japanese and English, the languages the characters would actually have spoken. But one of the other talking points around town was the “last-minute” assumption of the title role by Melbourne-born soprano, Janet Szepei Todd. OperaWire caught up with Janet at Cafe {…}
Most people can easily identify the first words that a character sings the moment they grace the stage. And there are a fair share of iconic goodbyes. But in general, those final lines of text aren’t quite as renowned for a fair share of characters. So for this quiz, we put you to the test to see if you can {…}
The true tragedy of Benjamin Britten and Ronaldo Duncan’s “The Rape of Lucretia” is that its story, about a virtuous woman in Ancient Rome who is raped by a powerful man, continues to re-enact itself in the modern world. What is arguably most complicated about the opera itself is that this tragedy is framed by the male gaze, which only {…}
The New York Opera Fest 2019 kicked off on Monday, April 29 and for the next several weeks, New Yorkers will get ample opportunity to enjoy opera in a variety of unique ways. As has been OperaWire’s tradition over the years, we have reached out to a number of the companies participating in the festival and have asked them a {…}